Sawran

Sawran stood in the dry country northwest of Yasi, between the Karatau foothills and the Syr Darya. Its imposing walls enclosed a city of markets, houses and religious buildings, with gateways and towers guarding the approaches across the plain. Beneath the surrounding plain, underground water channels brought water toward gardens and fields. The city formed a meeting point between the settled oases of Turkistan and the pastoral lands of the steppe, and its defences made it a formidable stronghold.

Sawran flourished after the Mongol period and became a prize in the struggles of the Kazakh khans and Shaybanid rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The writer Zayn al-Din Vasifi, who lived here in 1514–15, described a madrasa and the remarkable underground water system. He credited the religious patron Mir-i Arab with building channels for the city. The galleries tapped groundwater and carried it through the dry landscape, supplying the urban population as well as the cultivated land outside the walls.

Repeated warfare damaged Sawran toward the end of the sixteenth century. Although the city continued for a time, its eventual decline left the circuit of walls standing above deserted streets. The fortifications and traces of irrigation preserve the outline of a once prosperous city on the frontier between oasis and steppe.